Examples Of Using Big Data Today

Marketing, politics, health, sports ... Big Data applications are endless, so we bring you some current examples of its different uses. Big Data is a term that is used to define a large set of data or a combination of these. The storage, observation and processing of these to obtain relevant information is widely spread today. Let's see some examples of Big Data in our environment.

Our day to day is affected by the use of big data, for example, in the suggestions shown by applications such as Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook ... Behind all of them we find machine learning algorithms that process the relative data to our actions on those platforms and that, based on them, generate suggestions for us.

Big data is a collection of processes that consist of large volumes of data that are structured or unstructured and are used to assist business activities. Big data itself is a development of database systems in general. The difference here is the processing speed, volume, and types of data available are more numerous and varied than DBMS (Database Management System) in general.

The definition of big data can also be divided into 3 parts, which are commonly referred to as 3V:

1. Volume

The size of the data owned by big data has a large capacity. You can try to process data with a large size to run.

2. Velocity

The speed of data transfer is also very influential in the process of sending data effectively and stably. Big data has a speed that allows it to be received in real-time. The highest speed can be obtained directly through the data stream to memory when compared to that written on a disk.

3. Variety

The types of data variations owned by big data are more than using the SQL database system. This type of data is still traditional, more structured than unstructured data. For example, text, audio, and video are data that have not been defined directly and must go through several stages to be processed in a database.

Uses of Big Data

There are multiple tools to work with Big Data, such as Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL DB ... Next, we are going to comment on some concrete examples:

Big Data in marketing and sales

Customer data is analyzed and processed obtaining information regarding their tastes, preferences, behaviors. Thus, they can be classified or segmented into different categories and use predictive models so that organizations can have indicators of acceptance of their products, potential sales. For example, when a group of people buy glasses online, their purchase data will be analyzed based on factors such as age, gender, and occupation to get a general idea of what types of glasses are dominating the market today.

Big Data for the fight against crime

In the United States, law enforcement agencies have applications that, using Big Data, can predict the probability with which a crime can occur in a given area. With this, they have developed the so-called Risk Atlas (Smart Steps application in Massachusets).

Big Data in sports

In the NBA and the NFL, applications are used that make use of big data to define the strategies to be used in each game, prevent player injuries, know the preferences of the fans ...

Big Data in politics

Before the 2012 US elections, Obama and his team decided to use Big Data during the election campaign to analyze the data they collected from potential voters. They concluded that in order to win, they needed to focus on effectively targeting questionable voters while also getting convinced Democratic voters to vote.

They used the HP Vertica platform, which allowed them to collect data, efficiently and quickly notify information, and segment potential voters to determine which ones would be more receptive to advertising on TV, newspapers, social networks ... The field team, the Digital, and the communication department worked with a strategy based on the data obtained, thus obtaining their re-election.

Big Data in telecommunications

Some mobile phone operators use Big Data to analyze what is said about them on social networks, examine the data of their customer support tickets or their complaints. This makes it possible to implement strategies that reduce the number of portabilities or increase the acquisition of new customers.

Big Data in health and sanitation

Both in the pharmaceutical industry in the field of research on new drugs and in the diagnosis of diseases, the processing of collective Big Data (medical history, genetic material, prediction of hospital readmissions ...) is increasingly widely used to optimize and test models that improve outcomes, facilitate testing in clinical trials with new therapies, or improve diagnoses. Big Data is also useful for a more efficient administrative management of health.

It is essential for companies, public bodies, and institutions in today's world. Training in this field is essential for those who want to work in one of the professions with the most future. It is a discipline with very wide use, and it can be applied to different sectors with the common characteristics of reducing costs, being more efficient and faster.